


Like It Wasn't Him

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Non-Explicit Animal Death, Solipsism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 00:21:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17991332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "“I used to believe that no one else was alive.And all of the world was just a show inside my own mind.The dog’s on a leash, tied to a pole, shaking above the snowI try to pretend, I try to pretend, everything’s just in my head.”Armor For Sleep - Snow GlobeIDEK but I was listening to this and thought of Jack Frost and ALL OF THE FEELS D:Please tell me this song inspires someone to make something! Anything!+10 bonus for all of the angst!"Jack Frost is forced to conclude that he’s the only real person, and then, that he isn’t. Warning for solipsism and non-explicit animal death.





	Like It Wasn't Him

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr 7/7/2014.

Either he wasn’t there or they weren’t there. And he knew he had to be there, because otherwise, where would he be? (What would he be?) Surely he was there, wherever he was. He had a name. He had skin, and hair, and clothes, like he saw other people have. He moved through the wind, but the wind also moved him, and it moved him from place to place just like other people moved when they walked. He could see the landscape change under him, and he knew he had to be in the world, not…not real.   
  
But he wasn’t the same as the other people. They could walk through him like he wasn’t there. But he knew he was there. He was. He was.   
  
So they must not be there.  
  
It explained a lot of things, or at least it explained the most important thing: why they didn’t speak to him, or notice him when he shouted, or waved his hands in front of their faces. If they were all in his head, then there was no reason for them to acknowledge him. In a way, by existing, they already had.   
  
He learned to ignore the part of him that insisted a world where only he was real was improbable. That part of him didn’t have any evidence, anyway.  
  
He watched the parts of him that looked like other people to try and figure himself out. Some things, he liked. He liked it when he saw children playing in the snow; he liked it when he saw people dancing; he liked it when he saw families sit down to share a meal, even though he wasn’t sure how someone like him, who lived in a world of his own, knew what a family was.   
  
Other things, he didn’t like. He saw violence in word and deed, too many acts to name, but from war to ostracism, it made him hold tighter to the surety that he was the only person in the world. Sometimes there was pain that felt like war in his head. So it must have manifested out there. To think that something like that was happening to thousands upon thousands of real people, people just as real as him, with nothing he could do to stop it? He couldn’t think of that. He couldn’t.   
  
He tried to take lessons from what he saw, to calm his mind and grow from what he saw.   
  
It almost seemed to work. Some places got a lot cleaner. Some places got a lot safer. Others didn’t. And he could only think that somewhere, deep inside his soul, he still didn’t understand how to treat himself well.  
  
Just like whoever left that dog tied up outside in the snow didn’t know how to treat it well.   
  
If there were external causes, Jack could guess why they had done such a thing. No spare food. No stomach for deliberate killing. This part of the world had fallen on hard times.   
  
Jack looked to his own mind to try to find the parts that were starving and frozen. None of them felt quite like this.   
  
The dog looked at him like it wasn’t him.  
  
His fingers passed through the knot in the rope.  
  
The dog still looked at him like it wasn’t him until it couldn’t look anymore.


End file.
